Monday, June 20, 2016

What's It Like To Fire An AR-15?

[The gun shop owner] loves the AR-15 for cops, soldiers, hunters and target shooters. “It’s fun to shoot something like that,” he said. Not in my hands. I’ve shot pistols before, but never something like an AR-15. Squeeze lightly on the trigger and the resulting explosion of firepower is humbling and deafening (even with ear protection). The recoil bruised my shoulder. The brass shell casings disoriented me as they flew past my face. The smell of sulfur and destruction made me sick. The explosions — loud like a bomb — gave me a temporary case of PTSD. For at least an hour after firing the gun just a few times, I was anxious and irritable. Even in semi-automatic mode, it is very simple to squeeze off two dozen rounds before you even know what has happened. In fully automatic mode, it doesn’t take any imagination to see dozens of bodies falling in front of your barrel.

Yeah no.

Some have light trigger pulls and some don't. They're not "deafening" with even decent ear protection--as you have to wear shooting anything, even a small handgun, especially indoors. And I'm sure the gun shop didn't just stick cotton in his ears.

The recoil did not "bruise [his] shoulder." The .223 just doesn't have much recoil at all. If you held it an inch from your shoulder in order to maximize the impact, I guess it *might* give you a boo-boo...if you have unusually soft and delicate skin.

There was no "smell of sulfur and destruction." There's no sulfur in modern propellant.

And I doubt he hit anything, so there was probably very little destruction either.

He didn't get PTSD, even briefly, unless he's the fraidiest cat who ever walked the globe.

And it is NOT "simple to squeeze off two dozen rounds before you even know what has happened." You have to pull the trigger two dozen times to fire two dozen rounds. That's not something you really do involuntarily. Remember, this guy is not fighting for his life in Fallujah. He's plinking at the range.

And he has no idea what it's like on full auto because he didn't shoot it in full auto, as his cagey construction makes clear. He writes "In full auto mode it doesn't take any imagination to see dozens of bodies falling..." when what he had to mean is "It doesn't take any imagination to see dozens of bodies falling in full auto mode..." Not that fully automatic weapons are part of this discussion.

This kind of crap makes it hard to conduct a serious discussion about the issue. This is the dialectical equivalent of just bursting into tears at the mere mention of the AR-15. It doesn't contribute to the discussion rationally speaking...but, of course, that's not the point. The point is to rally the troops, tug at the heartstrings, preach to the choir...

I know there's crazy stuff on the other side too, but I happened to see this thanks to J. Carthensis. I know this is a fluff piece, but it annoyed me, so there it is.

1 Comments:

I was waiting for you to get a hold of that stinker. I almost sent it to you, but I knew it would end up rearing its ugly head before you soon enough.

Don't worry about him setting any sort of tone for the discussion about guns, though; as far as I can tell, his world-class pansihood is earning him Internet-wide excoriation.

You know humanity is in serious trouble when even the weapons we invent to better our abilities to protect ourselves are rendered inoperable by the pansification instilled by modern society. Merely the fact that a person actually wrote this indicates to me that we're on a seriously bad trajectory in that realm.

Our ancestors, you know, had to wrestle their behemoth food to the ground with sticks and rocks. Nowadays, we've got dudes who can't even press a button and hear a bang (through ear protection, no less) without professing to have become temporarily incapacitated by the trauma.

Oy. I have learned to look upon this phenomenon with a combination of Buddhist compassion and Greco-Roman Pagan disgust.